Other Comment Settings

The Other Comment Settings section tells WordPress how to handle comments:
✦ Comment Author Must Fill Out Their Name and E-Mail: Enabled by
default, this option requires all commenters on your blog to fill in the
Name and E-Mail fields when leaving comments. This option can really
help you combat comment spam. (See Book III, Chapter 5 for informa-
tion on comment spam.) Deselect this check box to disable this option.
✦ Users Must Be Registered and Logged in to Comment: Not enabled by Book III
default, this option allows you to accept comments on your blog from Chapter 3
only people who are registered and logged in as a user on your blog. If the user isn’t logged in, she sees a message that reads, “You Must Be Logged in in Order to Leave a Comment.”
✦ Automatically Close Comments on Articles Older Than X Days: Select
the check box next to this option to tell WordPress you want comments
on older articles to be automatically closed. Fill in the text box provided
with the number of days you want to wait before WordPress closes
comments on articles.
Many bloggers use this very effective anti-spam technique to keep the comment and trackback spam on their blog down.
✦ Enable Threaded (Nested) Comments X Levels Deep: From the drop-
down list, you can select the level of threaded comments you want to
have on your blog. The default is one; you can choose up to ten levels.
Instead of all comments being displayed on your blog in chronological
order (as they are by default), nesting them allows you and your readers
to reply to comments within the comment itself.

✦ Break Comments into Pages with X Comments Per Page: Fill in the text
box with the number of comments you want to appear on one page. This
setting can really help blogs that receive a large number of comments.
It provides you with the ability to break the long string of comments
into several pages, which makes them easier to read and helps speed
up the load time of your site because the page isn’t loading such a large
number of comments at once.
✦ Comments Should Be Displayed with the Older/Newer Comments at
the Top of Each Page: From the drop-down list, select Older or Newer.
Selecting Older displays the comments on your blog in the order of
oldest to newest. Selecting Newer does the opposite: displays the
comments on your blog in the order of newest to oldest.